Best Injury Poems
First grade, pelted with eggs
Second grade, broke both legs
Third grade, fell down the stairs
Fourth grade, clawed by a bear
Fifth grade, ran into a tree
Sixth grade, twisted a knee
Seventh grade, concussed my head
Eighth grade, fell out of bed
Ninth grade, had meningitis
Tenth grade, appendicitis
Eleventh grade, torn hamstring
Twelfth grade, acute bee sting...
So, to allay any fears from admission committees
I wrote the following college application ditty:
You may consider me somewhat injury-prone
But I have yet to break my first wishbone
And I give you my whole-hearted assurance
That I will use my parents' health insurance
My known, soothing landscapes,
grown from my own hues and shapes,
somehow vanquished their view.
Just one more sore blister of news
to aid my staid mind’s gist of confused.
My angered fist punched tears in their wake
before my shock shakily jot them on a list
of all my heart sought to restore propped.
Truth and I both awoke the first day of last September.
Coffee bound, then mumming around, it was not
long before I felt scared and anxiety provoked ~
?? ... the kitchen was in disorder,
nothing in its place * as I thought it over, I
realized all rooms were oddly rearranged *
back in my room, I paled at a stranger's
face in the mirror, a white-haired woman
wearing my face * the scales said I had
lost 20 pounds some place ... ??
I sagged to the floor from facts scored.
Should I wake my sleeping man to
answer my questions and more?
My fear decided I should hide
inside ignorance while I had the
chance. I was scared once truth made
up my bed, my life might fully
deplete under my own sheets.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Though details are clouded, I have surely been rerouted.
I try but fail to decipher what all determined this matter.
Prime pieces of me were clearly scattered blind-battered
by forces cemented to time-tatter my mind demented.
It feels as though I have been divorced from myself
by means of some unleashed, bruiser intruder.
I lack all recall of three times three hundred and sixty-five days.
My doctor cannot explain what dementia did to my brain.
A pyromaniac named Jack,
Who hailed from the town of Hackensack,
Decided one day,
with matches he’d play
He’s a mummy now, flat on his back!
I run my hand across my wrist,
The rough scars feel normal under my fingers,
But to anyone else, they would be foreign.
I was a fighter, I had to be,
But everything has its consequences.
Running the blade across my own wrist was mine,
It was the only way for me to feel something.
Since I was small I was forced to be strong,
But a child should not need to be strong.
I wasn’t even 14 and I had to fend for myself,
I had to pick up my broken pieces.
The scars on my body tell that story,
They are reminders of my pain.
I run my hand across my wrist,
The rough scars remind me that I will survive,
I did before, and I will now.
KLOMM!!!
...Broken now.
I can change it!
That Daniel Amen
Says so...
I can change it!
...Plasticity!
OW!!!
(That's all I can take,
My Brain Hurts)
Date Written: January 2, 2019
For: Brainy Brevity Poetry Contest
Sponsor: Maureen McGreavy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The body keeps its ledgers~
purple ink beneath the skin,
a ledger of missteps and collisions.
Some bloom tender as dusk,
others harden into topography,
maps of what we survived.
They whisper in fading yellows:
here,
you were alive enough to hurt.
Well how do you do, my name is Jack
Brain's still working but it's got a big crack
It's a World War II injury
Watching the war on TV
Munching on chips put my back outta whack
© Jack Ellison 2015
Well how do you do, my name is Jack
Brain's still working but it's developed a crack
It's a World War II injury
While watching it on TV
Munching on chips put my back outta whack
her cold crimson corpse
into the heart that loved him . . .
he now twists the knife
Written 4/9/15 by Andrea Dietrich
For the Get Your Senryu On Poetry Contest of Judy Konos
Divided under the cities
streams mapping decisive
endings while toiling about
the beginning boldness
reaching for braising
characters galloping
amidst a certain angst
we’ve devoured nothingness
and opened the sky
with truth thrashing
tempers meaningful tools
craving an emptiness
above the continuous
Bayshore a quiet offering
pelicans landings sinking
yet surrounding the
jaded light house that
withered to soon exposing
only the dim lantern leaning
to one side still brightening
the rippling waves
Written by Yolanda Nicholsen
April 7th 2014
getting injections
for traumatic brain injury
someone asked her what she was looking at
as she stood in front of the large picture window in the kitchen
in the abode where she presently resided---
the question came aloud from another room,
as if the questioner was busy themselves & only in passing
did they see the girl standing
with eyes focused,
arms at her sides,
as if in a private state of wonder
(& why a private state of wonder seems to be ample food for the
popular & public, pedantically preposterous, who prey upon the
rest of us---we’ll never know) &
so without hesitation they rambled out their comment,
not sticking around a moment for an answer &
as if that itself was not an answer to such a question,
the girl standing in front of the window
neglected to say anything, instead,
taking an extra moment to enjoy what it was that she
had been privately concerned with,
whatever images appeared out there
that her own sense of sensory perception
was devouring, free of the babble
swirling all around,
incessantly---
as I lay beneath the twillight
of my perpetrual youth
why under a knights cloak
I'd withered very quickly
saddled beyond self an unconscious
metaphor idealistically reaching for
melancholy congressional desires
morbid meetings of the mind
I could only invision
through dark windows
in my head I'd drifted
calmly into madness into a sheer
sleep state of awareness
a rapture of small panting's
kept me ajar amidst the emptiness
of bruised brain matter so well crafted
while dreaming in pieces
I was a young man at the age of nineteen
When I was sent to a country on the other side of the world that I had never seen.
I was trained as an infantry soldier
With an M-16 rifle on my back;
And given an M-79 grenade launcher
In case of enemy ambush or attack.
Along with my Brothers In Arms, I fought in Cambodia and in the Highlands of the Vietnam jungles;
As soldiers, we were always faced with threats and struggles.
One unfortunate day, I was ambushed and shot with an enemy soldier’s rifle
His bullet struck and went through my arm;
At first, I didn’t know I was hit; perhaps my body was in denial.
Eventually, intense pain set in, the blood began to pour;
My lieutenant made the call for a medavac helicopter
To take me to a hospital so that I could be treated and cared for.
For my wounds sustained as a result of enemy action
I was awarded the solemn distinction of The Purple Heart;
My life has been forever changed
Because of this war in which I had to take part.
Flashbacks still haunt me in my head
Wounded, yes, but I thank God that I’m not dead.
As soldiers, we fight for our country and sometimes we make a great sacrifice;
As Purple Heart recipients, it’s our bodies that have to pay that ultimate price.
My face tells me nothing. Not nothing but nothing useful,
the complications of ageing humorously but not how to avoid
injury.
Permanent injury is a now popular cliché. At this age any injury
could result in pneumonia, pain in bitterness for your peers,
your jury.
What a headache I have! And never forget injury provokes
at best only pity. Friends are merely friendly, they belong to the
majority.
They forget your name and so should you, who are you? Even you
don't know for sure. In relation to community, no change was noted in
the
registry.
Still, man's mercy, economy's ecology, there's some joy in being small,
some joy in staying strong, and keeping death before you without
perjury.
Unsafe to run the wind. A big stick might hit your head. Then
the hip and heart and head will hurt, all three. Un-
fortunately.
I like a strong wind. Dangerous to go out in. As a fire or flood.
I like the way we are at risk, not a risk-averse weasel. A carnivore,
very hungry.
Pay money, take chances. Yo's an elegant contraction of you.
Cool. Message from street to board: mongrels rule. Democracy or
tyranny.
Scared to die? Why? Take appropriate measures, descend through
meditation. Be empty, rest. And to your friends and sons be as
gravity.
Tired of death. It's what it is. Let's play sports, have sex, kayak
to the huckleberries, fish for marvelous fish, live a wonderful life, give
generously.
Done blowing, O wild wind? Not yet? So be it. I lay my head
in your felt hands. The motion of the branches, evolutionary branches,
are my
guarantee.
That's all folks, 7:30. The sky is clear, the crows are out. The clouds
are with my mood commensurate. I should shout, having lived
prodigiously.
it would have been an injury to them both
to attempt a description,
to bring what it was that compelled the girl to silence
(if she had not chose silence beforehand---one outside can never be sure)
to formulate an image, to dispel some kind of physical qualities verbally
which to the person outside
might have made some impression upon them,
because that unique allurement of which the girl did focus
could never truly be brought into any kind of distinction for the rest of us,
in fact to try would only taint it & do a disservice to the whole of the
event---
rather, even a more considerate onlooker, who stopped when crossing into the other room, in order to ask the girl about her moment in awe,
would only force a quick death to what was happening,
like waking up from a dream involving the two,
neither can make the other understand
anything but the attempt at understanding,
for what is to be understood
exists solely on its own---right out there in the focus,
or it lies dead in our savage
description---
and when the questioner came back after a few minutes,
unsatisfied with the absence of any answer
(as so many of us impatient imbeciles are),
after turning, the girl spoke a few phrases
which to the questioner seemed only nonsense at best,
as if she’d been spoken to in a language that she didn’t know---
what had been said was simply a description also,
one that felt only like another installment,
a domino in the falling, predictable effect,
wherein one person tries to get at the heart of the matter,
while the other tries to help them &
a million conversations begin, part ways &
begin again,
constantly picking up the baton & then dropping it,
be it like the boredom of rereading a “choose your own adventure” book,
or a fresh new mistake
found when the collision of the selves within
mess up the overall stability of the
whole.